Week 3 Reflection.

                                       Reference: Selwyn College .::. Digital Technologies

                                                                www.selwyn.school.nz

During week 3, I was introduced to tools that could be beneficial to me as a teacher within the 21^st century classroom. These websites like Weebly, Blog’s, Wiki’s and many others were explored to show how they can be used for collaborating and interacting with others and how they could be incorporated into the classroom. I have never attempted the use of such sites before and have found this confronting and challenging to grasp the understanding of such technologies, but now embracing these challenges will enable my confidence to grow and develop new ways of teaching in the 21^st century. My reflection this week will be based on the Wiki’s site and how I can incorporate it within a classroom to improve the outcomes of my students.

I have found that to understand the Wiki’s site, I must delve into what makes it work and how it can be useful for what I teach. Investigating this I have found that this online forum site allows visitors to join and collaborate with the organiser, contributing their information and ideas for further evaluation from others. The site also allows the organiser (teacher) to set up to site for privacy, selecting who can see it, an important feature for not only privacy but for legal and ethical policies within the education system. Wiki’s allows the ability to create false usernames for students, allowing them to remain anonyms for the creation of their work. This will further increase student’s self-confidence as they are able to speak freely without fear of others judging them personally. The ability of monitoring can still be done by the organiser (teacher) providing constructive feedback to the students without the other students being able to see, these features again illustrates that learning outcomes can be improved.

Wiki’s could be a valuable tool for both of my teaching areas, IT&D and Geography are well suited for the interaction of digital technologies. The application for industrial technologies and design means that wiki can be used for interactive video clips, workshop related instructional information, quizzes and collaboration between teachers and students. One of the links I have entered on the wiki site directs the students to another web site with information regards safety and links to another site for a quiz. Wiki itself can be set up to contain these worksheets, quizzes, online collaboration through discussions increasing their personalised knowledge. Whilst reflecting it is apparent that these synthesises with digital pedagogy and with the SAMR model of substation, augmentation, modification and redefinition. The substitution level addresses the sources given by the teacher to complete their set tasks e.g. the uploaded pdf of the information reading that the students must read before attempting the quiz. With the quiz that I have set could be synthesised to the argumentation level, using the knowledge acquired from the readings to answer the quiz. The teacher is then able to provide constructive feedback to the students online. Modifying the reading material to visual and even interactive, or encouraging the students to assist in their own learning could be seen as higher order thinking leading to students researching, developing, and designing their own work, embedding videos, pictures and interactive slides, presenting them to the rest of the class for feedback would see the students become more creative and active learners.

 

Reference: Schrock, K.(2013). SAMR and Blooms. Retrieved from http://www.schrockguide.net/samr.html


Wiki link
Weebly Link
Voki Voice Intro

I just made a new Voki. See it here:

I just made a new Voki. See it here:

Week 2: De Bono’s Hats

The Idea of De Bono’s hat work well for this activity, showing that you need to have a variety of perspectives. This week has seen the first real scaffolding activity of digital pedagogy in ICT, allowing the use of Wiki, using De Bono’s hats to further explore Mobile phones within schools has given the potential of collaboration of information with fellow students.  The activity we used both Bloom’s Taxonomy and SAMR model and found that they synthesise with the activity, the exercise linked to the redefinition stage of the SAMR model, allowing us to collaborate with students not only within class but to many others at the same time where in the Bloom’s Taxonomy allowed us to use higher order thinking and synthesise, analyse and evaluate of critical information to form new perspectives. For students that may struggle with technology at school this could work for or against them by not keeping them engaged in the learning activities.   

Week one E learning reflections.

The first week has seen an introduction to utilising ITC products in the 21st classroom to engage students with the teacher for improved learning. If teachers are going to successfully include ICT resources into their pedagogies, they will need to first understand the students they are working with. Part of the lesson was to use an IPAD with an app of QR reader and understand the benefits that it has within the classroom. After gaining the basic knowledge of this, we then had to find 9 Q-reader codes and develop 3 key ideas of the information contained within. Once completed, we then recorded the ideas and uploaded for comment. I found this very confronting as I am not a person that enjoys being in front of a camera. The lesion certainly reinforced the benefits of ICT to both the students and teachers, giving students the opportunity to work at their own pace or in pairing, thus giving ownership of one's own work.  This is a new area of teaching, digital pedagogy has open my eyes up to just how far we as teachers can go in improving learning outcomes with technology.  The exercise in this first week also made me realise how much the world has changed, regarding digital technologies and how it can be used. It’s made me realise that I have to change my thinking and showed me how I can use this technology within my selected subjects. Today's technologies are certainly far advanced compared to my day at school and will continue to evolve, meaning there is a constant learning environment for teachers as well.